Political Order and Political Decay (30 page)

Pinchot's decision to end-run President Taft might be regarded as an act of bureaucratic hubris by an official who had gotten too used to reading his own publicity notices. In the end, however, his last stand as chief forester had a positive effect for the cause of sustainable forestry. Taft was severely embarrassed by the incident, and the Old Guard of the party was put on the defensive. Speaker Cannon was to lose his powers of appointment in a revolt by the Progressive wing of the party two years later. Roosevelt's wing kept up pressure to maintain his legacy on conservation issues. The Forest Service's authority to purchase additional lands was approved by Congress in 1911 in the Weeks Act, which constituted the final consolidation of the bureau's powers.
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Pinchot, for all of his political maneuvering, had created an institution, an organization that could survive the departure of its charismatic early leader.

Pinchot's career, moreover, was far from finished. He would go on to help Roosevelt in his 1912 Progressive Party bid for another term as president. He himself ran, unsuccessfully, for the Senate and was eventually twice elected governor of Pennsylvania.

CAPTURE AND AUTONOMY

The Interstate Commerce Commission and the U.S. Forest Service are only two examples of American state building and political development. There are others that occurred in the Progressive Era, though the next big wave of state building would have to await the New Deal in the 1930s. They would be followed by the plethora of agencies that constitute the American government today: the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Aviation Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, the Environmental Protection Agency, and many, many others.

The ICC and the Forest Service were both necessary interventions on the part of the state. The railroads constituted potentially monopolistic enterprises whose scale and capital requirements generated huge social conflicts. Forests were not being well managed by their private owners, and distribution of the nation's public lands had become a huge source of patronage and corruption. In both cases the country needed an impartial regulator that was not under the thumb of the powerful interests involved. The U.S. state-building response to these problems occurred much later than it did in other industrializing countries, such as Germany and Britain, which were not constrained by America's institutional checks and balances or by its antistatist political culture.

These two government agencies differed greatly with regard to quality and the effectiveness with which they performed their mandates. The difference, I would argue, has to do with the degree of autonomy with which they operated. The ICC in some sense could never become autonomous due to its contradictory mandate and governance structure. Rather than being run as a hierarchical executive branch agency with a single head, it was structured as a commission with balanced representation of the two political parties. This ensured that it could never stray very far from its legislative overseers and that it would never have a visionary leader like Gifford Pinchot. When it tried to strike out on its own in its early years, it was immediately cut back by the courts, and then pulled in different directions by the political winds in Congress. As a result, the ICC, while eventually acquiring adequate enforcement powers to do its job, remained captive of the political forces that created it. Subject to rules not of its own making, the ICC over time appeared hidebound and nonadaptive. It was one of the first objects of the deregulatory trend that began in the 1970s, even before Ronald Reagan became president.

The Forest Service was very different. It was organized with a distinct ethos of scientific forestry by Bernhard Fernow and was lodged within a modernizing Agriculture Department that had strong and stable leadership under Secretary James S. Wilson for an extraordinary length of time. Its second leader, Gifford Pinchot, was one of the most energetic and remarkable men of the Progressive Era, working hand in glove with a president who shared his values, outlook, and exuberance. He and his political superiors did not simply fulfill a political mandate set by Congress; he created his own mandate. No elected official instructed him to publish reports on modern forestry techniques, or to cultivate newspaper editors, or to reach out to scientific societies and trade groups around the country. Needless to say, no one told him to conspire with sympathetic congressmen to move control over forests from the Interior Department; indeed, most legislators paying attention to this issue were strongly opposed in principle to a bureaucrat meddling in politics in this manner. Midlevel public officials, after all, are supposed to be mere agents, and Congress the principal; here was a case of an agent run amok. Pinchot had an agenda for the country that he believed was in the long-term public interest, and that agenda was not necessarily coincident with that of the leaders of Congress. This is the meaning of state autonomy: a government that is responsive to interest groups but not owned by them, that is not too easily swayed by the short-term vagaries of democratic public opinion but rather looks to long-term public interest. The Forest Service became the nation's premier bureaucracy precisely because it was not hampered by mandated rules excessively limiting its discretion.

The fact that Gifford Pinchot as an agent was not under the strict control of his congressional principals suggests that the principal-agent framework by which contemporary economists understand the problems of organizational dysfunction is perhaps not adequate to really understand how good bureaucracies work.

It is impossible to talk about the Forest Service without reference to Gifford Pinchot's background and character. Like his friend Teddy Roosevelt, he represented a type of elite American that would fade away by the end of the twentieth century: of Anglo-Saxon stock, strongly Puritan in his religious beliefs, hailing from the old Northeast, familiar with European practices, and educated at Phillips Exeter and Yale (Roosevelt attended Harvard). The agency he created was staffed by some of his old Yale classmates; many young recruits would come out of the new Yale School of Forestry that his family endowed. In the tradition of John Quincy Adams, he was precisely the kind of northeastern elitist that western and southern populists in the Jacksonian tradition had learned to despise. But the more deeply democratic Jacksonians were the ones who had created the patronage system in America; their hostility to big government and rigid defense of property rights was what had turned the nineteenthcentury American state into a machine for dispensing jobs, seeds, and land to private interests and political backers, often represented by one and the same individual. By contrast, it was the older northeastern elites, familiar with European traditions, that reversed course during the Progressive Era and created a modern state based on merit and the impersonal treatment of citizens.

The United States was the first democracy to open up the franchise to all white male voters, and it did so at a time before a modern state had been established. As a result, it invented the practice of clientelism and had a weak and ineffective national government for much of the nineteenth century. The United States followed Britain in reforming its public sector, but this process took far longer due to the country's institutional barriers to reform.

Reform of the American public sector at the beginning of the twentieth century did not end the problem of the political capture of the public sector by narrow private interests, or of political corruption. While American politicians no longer dole out public-sector jobs and Christmas turkeys to individual voters to the extent they did in the 1880s, they indulge in the wholesale granting of favors to political clients in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, and other legislative perks. As we will see in chapter 31, interest-group politics infected not just the ICC and railroad regulation but also the Forest Service itself, which by the 1980s had become an increasingly dysfunctional agency captured by its different constituencies.

Other countries around the world—indeed, probably a majority of those in the developing world—are where the United States was in the early nineteenth century. They have adopted democratic elections and opened up the franchise under conditions of great state weakness. They, like the United States from the 1830s on, have clientelist political systems in which votes are traded for individual favors.

Clientelist politics was ended in the United States as the result of a long-term political struggle between new middle-class actors who had a strong interest in creating a more modern form of government and the older entrenched patronage politicians. Underlying this shift was a social revolution brought about by industrialization, which mobilized a host of new political actors with no interest in the old clientelist system. However, as the Greek and Italian cases indicated, impersonal government is not the inevitable by-product of economic modernization.

In building a modern state and overcoming clientelism, the United States had one big advantage over many contemporary developing countries: from the first days of the republic, it had a strong national identity that was rooted less in ethnicity or religion than in a set of political values centering around loyalty to its own democratic institutions. Americans in some sense worshipped their Constitution, which embodied universalistic values making the assimilation of new, culturally different immigrants relatively easy. As Seymour Martin Lipset used to point out, in the United States one could be accused of being “un-American” in a way that one could not be “un-German” or “un-Greek,” since Americanism constituted a set of values that could be adopted voluntarily rather than an inherited ethnic characteristic. Successful state building is dependent, therefore, on the prior existence of a sense of national identity that serves as a locus of loyalty to the state itself, rather than to the social groups underlying it.

 

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NATION BUILDING

How national identities are critical to state building; how nationalism is properly seen as a type of identity politics; why identity is a modern phenomenon linked to technology and economic change; four routes to national identity

Critical to the success of state building is a parallel process of nation building, an often violent and coercive process that took place in all the countries under discussion in Part I.

State building refers to the creation of tangible institutions—armies, police, bureaucracies, ministries, and the like. It is accomplished by hiring staff, training officials, giving them offices, providing them with budgets, and passing laws and directives. Nation building, by contrast, is the creation of a sense of national identity to which individuals will be loyal, an identity that will supersede their loyalty to tribes, villages, regions, or ethnic groups. Nation building in contrast to state building requires the creation of intangible things like national traditions, symbols, shared historical memories, and common cultural points of reference. National identities can be created by states through their policies on language, religion, and education. But they are just as often established from the bottom up by poets, philosophers, religious leaders, novelists, musicians, and other individuals with no direct access to political power.

Nation building is critical to the success of state building. This reaches to the core meaning of the state: as the organizer of legitimate violence, the state periodically calls upon its citizens to risk their lives on its behalf. They will never be willing to do so if they feel that the state as such is unworthy of ultimate sacrifice. But the impact of national identity on state strength is not limited to its coercive power. Much of what passes for corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the by-product of legislators or public officials who feel more obligated to family, tribe, region, or ethnic group than to the national community and therefore divert money in that direction. They are not necessarily immoral people, but their circle of moral obligation is smaller than that of the polity for which they work. Citizens, for their part, may rationally calculate how loyal to be based on whether the state has upheld its end of the social contract. Political stability is bolstered enormously, however, if they feel that the state is legitimate and experience the emotions associated with patriotism. The contemporary Chinese Communist Party earns legitimacy today due to its economic performance. But it also has an important extra margin of support as an embodiment of Chinese nationalism.

If a strong sense of national identity is a necessary component of state building, it is also for that reason dangerous. National identity is often built around principles of ethnicity, race, religion, or language, principles that necessarily include certain people and exclude others. National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict even as it strengthens internal social cohesion. National cohesion may express itself as external aggression. Human beings cooperate in order to compete, and compete to cooperate.
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NATIONAL IDENTITY AND MODERNIZATION

Nationalism is one specific form of identity politics that found its first major expression in the French Revolution. It is based on the view that the political boundaries of the state ought to correspond to a cultural boundary, one defined primarily by shared language and culture.
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Key to the idea of identity is the notion that there can be a disjunction between one's inner, authentic self and the social norms or practices that are sanctioned by the surrounding society. That inner self can be based on nation, ethnicity, race, culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any characteristic that binds human communities together. The philosopher Charles Taylor, following Hegel, points out that struggles over identity are inherently political because they involve demands for recognition. Human beings are not satisfied, pace the economists, by material resources alone. They demand as well that their authentic selves be publicly recognized—granted dignity and equal status—by other people. This is why for nationalists the symbols of recognition—a flag, a seat in the United Nations, or legal status as a member of the community of nations—are of critical importance. Social mobilization, one of the six dimensions of development, is a by-product of the emergence of new identities as people become aware of shared experiences and values.
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